No Chastity Belt

Richard Grossman's diaries were hardly the hottest memoirs ever to hit the British press--no sex and scant scandal. But the former Minister of Housing and Secretary of State for Social Services, who died last year, did set down a candid account of life in Prime Minister Harold Wilson's first Labor Cabinet, between 1964 and 1970.

Aroused, the current Labor government last spring sued to stop the London Sunday Times's serialization of the diaries and Publisher Jonathan Cape's book version. Attorney General Samuel Silkin argued that Cabinet discussions and civil servants' advice must remain forever inviolate to ensure their candor--a contention that the Guardian warned would "put an end to political journalism."

Past Bullying. Last week Grossman won a posthumous victory for press freedom in Britain. Lord Widgery, Lord Chief Justice of England, ruled that the government cannot put a seal of secrecy on its internal business without convincing the court that silence is "clearly necessary in the public interest." In the Grossman case, Widgery said, the government did no such thing.

The controversy has been widely compared to the Pentagon papers case, in which the U.S. Supreme Court upheld on First Amendment grounds of press freedom the right of the New York Times and the Washington Post to publish secret government documents on U.S. involvement in Viet Nam. Britain has no such written constitutional guarantee; governments have in the past had little trouble bullying the press into bland quiescence, and the courts have stood idly by. Jubilant British journalists greeted Lord Widgery's decision as a long stride in the other direction. "It ends the notion that civil servants should be protected in perpetuity with some sort of chastity belt," said Sunday Times Editor Harold Evans. "It was a beautiful decision, a triumph of common sense over bureaucracy."

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